Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  Then came another distraction.

  Mrs. Shipley

  On Valentine's Day, 1952, Mrs. Ruth B. Shipley, head of the State Department's passport division, wrote a note. "My dear Dr. Pauling: You are informed that your request for a passport has been carefully considered by the Department. However, a passport of this Government is not being issued to you since the Department is of the opinion that your proposed travel would not be in the best interests of the United States."

  When he read it, Pauling was irritated but not surprised. Passports had become another political weapon since the passage of the Internal Security Act of 1950 broadened the government's power to refuse political dissidents the right to travel. Shipley, a fervent anti-Communist and security-minded sister of a pre-Hoover FBI director, took advantage of her position as head of the State Department's Passport Division to refuse passports to anyone she and the State Department's security personnel—or the FBI, with which she kept in close contact— suspected of being too far left and too loud about it.

  After 1950, her power to refuse passports was almost unlimited, and Shipley wielded her new weapon like a committed Cold Warrior. In a one-year period following May 1951, her office barred three hundred Americans from going abroad, sometimes on the flimsiest of excuses. Targets ranged from African-American singer and admitted pro-Communist Paul Robeson to Indiana University virus researcher and moderate leftist Salvador Luria. Suspicious foreigners were also refused visas to enter the United States, resulting in embarrassing situations for the organizers of international meetings, including the huge World Chemical Conclave. Pauling publicly protested the visa denials and joined a group formed specifically to protest the Internal Security Act. But passport interference was especially hard to deal with because there was no clear route for appeal.

  Shipley had been keeping an eye on Pauling, and her interest deepened when she saw his name among those speaking out against State Department policies. In late October 1951, in response to an earlier request Pauling made for a passport for a possible trip to Europe and India, she initiated a Security Office investigation. The process was short and to the point. State Department officials read his FBI files and interviewed a single anonymous source, who told them that Pauling was "a professional do-gooder" driven into politics by his wife, "a complete fool with regard to politics," who "assures her husband daily on the hour that he has one of the three greatest minds in the world today, and that he should not deny the uninformed and ignorant his leadership and ability."

  On the basis of that information, Shipley concluded that "there is good reason to believe that Dr. Pauling is a Communist" and refused him a passport. Pauling responded to his Valentine's Day denial by firing off a letter to Harry Truman, asking him to "rectify this action, and to arrange the issuance of a passport to me. I am a loyal and conscientious citizen of the United States. I have never been guilty of any unpatriotic or criminal act." He attached a copy of the Medal of Merit citation Truman had signed. The president's secretary wrote back that it was strictly a Passport Division decision but that the White House was requesting a reexamination. When Shipley stood firm, Truman's office did nothing more.

  In April, Pauling decided to simplify matters by restricting his trip to England only and wrote an exceedingly polite letter to Shipley offering to meet with her at her convenience later in the month when he would be in the East. The purpose of his trip to Washington, D.C., he mentioned pointedly, was to chair a meeting of an Office of Naval Research committee. Then he put lawyer Abraham Lincoln Wirin on the case. Wirin and Pauling peppered the passport office with transcripts of his IERB hearing, information about the Russian attack on Pauling, and copies of his many awards.

  But Shipley's mind was made up. On April 18, she again wrote him that his passport was being refused.

  Time was now getting short. The Royal Society meeting was set for May 1. On April 21, Pauling and Ava Helen paid a personal visit to the Passport Office. After a short wait in the lobby, they were ushered into the presence of a tightly controlled, tight-lipped Ruth Shipley. The Paulings assumed a polite but forceful tone they thought appropriate for an official who was, after all, a public servant. They asked her for the specific reasons Pauling's passport was being denied. Her response, Pauling remembered, was "a rather vague general statement" about his Communist-front activities. She brushed aside further questions and made it clear that the decision to deny his passport had been hers to make and she had made it. There would be no further debate. She then showed them into the office of the director of security and consular affairs, who asked Pauling to provide written evidence that supported his claim that he was not a Communist. Pauling had some relevant documents airmailed overnight from Pasadena and took them in the next day, including his statement under oath that he was not a member of the Communist Party. He was told brusquely that a decision would be reached as soon as it was reached but that there was no telling when.

  By now Pauling felt that this was more than frustrating; it was insulting. He had arrived as a distinguished citizen ready to solve a problem and was being treated like a truant schoolboy.

  He rearranged his travel plans to take a later flight and continued his protest, going so far as to get the president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to write a letter on his behalf. Nothing did any good. On April 28, two hours before the last plane that would get him to London on time was to leave, he received final word that his passport would not be granted. The next day, Pauling wired the Royal Society that he would not be able to attend the meeting being held in his honor.

  The English sponsors of the meeting were incredulous. Many of the attendees learned about it at a formal tea that Pauling had been slated to attend the day before the meeting's start. One of them later recalled "the shock that it produced, the outrage at the stupidity of the State Department at detaining the great man as if he were a dangerous character."

  - - -

  Corey, who was slated to give a talk of his own, and Caltech crystallographer Eddie Hughes were already in London when the news broke. Pauling had told Hughes to be prepared to stand in for him, but it was laughable to think that it would really happen. This, after all, was going to be one of the most important presentations in the history of the study of protein structure, and of course Pauling would be there to deliver it. Not hearing any news, Hughes went to Heathrow Airport to meet the last plane Pauling could have taken, and it was only when his boss did not come down the ramp that it began to sink in that he was going to have to make the speech himself. In his hotel room that night Hughes nervously read and reread the manuscript Pauling had prepared, with notations to indicate where to show the twenty slides that went with it. It was a long talk, but Hughes practiced until it just fit within the standard hour-long slot.

  The next morning, adrenaline flowing, he walked into the ornate meeting room of the Royal Society, mounted the dais, and was informed that he would have twenty minutes to speak. "There I was, standing before the Royal Society, with Charles the Second's oil painting looking over my shoulder, wondering what I should leave out," he said. Hughes slashed furiously at his copy of the speech while Corey went first with a talk about amino-acid structures. He was not done editing when his time came to speak, and he managed only to stumble through a review of Pauling's chemical approach to structure—the importance of the planarity of the peptide bond, correct interatomic distances and bond angles, maximum formation of hydrogen bonds— when he ran out of time. Seeing a disaster in the making, a member moved that Hughes should have an extra ten minutes. That gave him time to read Pauling's conclusion: "In view of the success that has thus far been obtained by this method of attack, it seems justified to assume that proposed configurations of polypeptide chains that deviate largely from the structural principles that have now been formulated . . . may be ruled out of consideration." Pauling would have delivered the lines with ringing confidence. Hughes sat down with a sigh of relief. There was scattered applause.

  Fo
r the rest of the day, Hughes remembered, "the Englishmen sat there, telling us what was wrong." Astbury led the attack, reminding everyone that the alpha helix did not explain the 5.1-angstrom reflection, while his own kinked-ribbon model did; that Pauling's density calculations left "discrepancies . . . much too great to be reasonable," that Pauling ignored side-chain interactions; that too much reliance was being placed on data from artificial polypeptides. Dorothy Hodgkin remained neutral, reporting that her insulin-diffraction patterns could support either Astbury's model or Pauling's. Bernal reiterated the lack of proof for the presence of the alpha helix in any globular protein. Ian MacArther pointed out that Pauling had been rather free with his numerical corrections in response to criticisms, noting that "on occasion, the alpha helix has been as deft in explaining error as well as fact." Bragg did not need to say anything.

  Only John Edsall, an American hemoglobin researcher given the honor of speaking last, came to Pauling's defense. He lauded Pauling's chemical approach as "one of the major landmarks in our thinking about acceptable configurations for polypeptide chains in proteins" and called the alpha helix "one of the great creative triumphs of thinking in the field of protein chemistry."

  But the damage was done. Hughes felt that the Caltech team had been bushwhacked, especially when at the end of the day he and Corey, eager to rebut the English critics, were allowed just five minutes to do it. "I was very angry," Hughes remembered. "I wrote Pauling and told him I thought we'd gotten a dirty deal."

  Bragg, too, had regrets. Everyone at the meeting was very sorry indeed that Pauling had not been there, he wrote Pauling immediately afterward. "There was much discussion about your model of the alpha helix; a number of people are still doubtful about it and you ought to have been there to answer their questions personally." As for himself, Bragg added, he was convinced of the alpha helix's "essential correctness"—at least in artificial polypeptides.

  - - -

  Despite the tough reception for his protein ideas, Pauling's passport plight was widely deplored in England. It started at the May 1 meeting, where U.S. State Department science adviser Joe Koepfli found himself cornered by irate English scientists who told him that his government's travel policies were suspiciously and unacceptably like Russia's. The left-wing press in England made the case a cause celebre, with the Daily Worker (London) headline blaring: "Iron Curtain Round Scientist."

  On May 5, Secretary of State Dean Acheson read a telexed copy of a letter published that morning in the Times (London) by Sir Robert Robinson, Britain's leading organic chemist, winner of the Nobel Prize and a man known generally for his reserve. Sir Robert took the State Department to task for its "deplorable" actions in the Pauling case. "It would be insincere to pretend that we have no inkling of the reason for the drastic action taken by the American authorities," he wrote, "but that does not lessen our surprise and consternation." In a cover note, a U.S. embassy attaché in London stressed that "this one case is resulting in a definite and important prejudice to the American national interest."

  The news from France was no better. Two days after the Royal Society meeting, in a slap directed at the U.S. government, the French elected Pauling "Honorary President" of a biochemistry symposium scheduled for Paris that summer. French scientists were united in their criticism of the Pauling case; the U.S. science attaché in Paris was informed by one physiologist that the Americans must be "losing their minds." The Pauling case was splashed across the front page of the leftwing L'Humanite, along with the story of French scientists denied visas to visit the United States. "The accumulating number of such cases is causing strong feelings and is resulting in considerable mistrust as to our motives," the attaché wrote his superiors in Washington, D.C.

  The European outcry was heard in the offices of the New York Times, which ran a pair of news stories in early May along with an editorial, "Dr. Pauling's Predicament," calling for an investigation of passport policy. The State Department was quickly peppered with pro-Pauling protest letters. Bernal and thirty other British scientists signed one; Harold Urey, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Bill Libby, and other leading atomic scientists from the University of Chicago wrote another, asking Dean Acheson, "What harm, what information, what tales could Professor Pauling take with him to England, even if he were so inclined, that can compare in damage to the incredible advertisement that this country forbids one of its most illustrious citizens to travel?" Einstein wrote Acheson to protest and then sent Pauling a note of personal support. "It is very meritorious of you to fight for the right to travel," he wrote. "The fact that independent minds like you are being rebuked equally by official America and official Russia is significant and to a certain degree also amusing." Even DuBridge could not ignore the issue and noted publicly that the Pauling case was "not in keeping with our democratic traditions."

  The State Department was not alone in hearing from aggrieved citizens. Spurred by angry letters and telegrams from their constituents, a half-dozen U.S. senators and representatives, from Henry Cabot Lodge to Richard Nixon, asked for more details on the case.

  And Pauling, too, buoyed by his supporters, renewed his fight. He sent in another passport application for travel to England and France that summer, talked to the press—telling one reporter, "This whole incident, to be blunt, stinks"—wrote Acheson and Truman letters of protest, and brought his case to the attention of Oregon's maverick senator Wayne Morse, who became "incensed," Pauling remembered. Morse thundered on the Senate floor that the State Department's passport policies were "tyrannical" and Acheson was "an undesirable employee of the government." He then began drawing up new legislation to create a process for appeals of passport decisions. The nation's news and thought magazines picked up the issue.

  Through it all, Ruth Shipley was not moved. She referred inquiring congressmen to the House Un-American Activities Committee pamphlet "A Campaign to Disarm and Defeat the United States," which detailed Pauling's Communist-front activities, and brushed off everyone else. When one scientist got through to her on the telephone to ask why Pauling's passport had been denied, she cut him short, saying, "As I had to defer to the scientists on scientific matters on which they were expert, they would have to defer to the Department in so technical a matter as the refusal of a passport."

  Secretary of State Acheson, however, could not ignore the issue. He wanted to defend his passport policy, but when he studied it, he realized that there existed neither clear guidelines for the decision to revoke a passport nor any proper appeals process. By late May, the Pauling case had spurred the State Department to outline publicly for the first time its policy on refusing passports, but the language used was so broad and vague that the press would not buy it. A few weeks later, Acheson released a longer explanation, including details of how appeals should be handled step by step, with those refused retaining the right to bring in counsel. The wording made it appear that the process had been in place for months, but it was news to Pauling, especially the part about his right to a lawyer. He immediately wrote Acheson that his explanation "does not correspond to my own experience."

  The furor resulted in special attention to his new passport application. Shipley routinely refused it in June, but when she sent it up for the usual rubber-stamp approval from Acheson's office, there was a review. During the next week, the Pauling case was discussed intensively at the highest levels of the State Department. The decision was made to end what had become a public relations fiasco with minimal fanfare. Shipley was overruled. Pauling was to be granted a limited passport—good for a short period of time for travel only in England and France—provided that he sign a new affidavit denying membership in the Communist Party. No public announcement was to be made. If reporters asked, the official line was to be that "new evidence" had altered the case. Although Acheson had been involved in making the decision, his name was not to be attached to it in any way. No other details were to be provided.

  Pauling was surprised and jubilant when he heard the news. On July 1
1 he showed up at the Los Angeles field office to sign the affidavit. On July 14, his passport was granted.

  Not everyone was pleased. Ruth Shipley fumed at being overruled. J. Edgar Hoover, his long-standing interest in Pauling reawakened, dispatched an agent to her office to ask what the "new evidence" was. Shipley told him that the FBI knew as much about it as she did and then let Hoover's agents comb through Pauling's State Department records. After a thorough search, the agents concluded: "A review of the file fails to disclose exactly what this new evidence is, unless it refers to the volume of letters and comments in the file protesting the previous refusal of a passport to the subject."

  Pauling was once again heartened. His was the first case in which public protest had made a difference in passport policy. Ruth Shipley was now under scrutiny, and a new passport appeals process was being developed to ensure a more reasonable and fair hearing for anyone else denied the right to travel.

  Variety Act

  Pauling's unexpected arrival at the Paris International Biochemical Congress caused a sensation. News of his political troubles and defiance of the government had made him a hero in France, and his hastily arranged talk on protein structures drew an overflow crowd. Afterward, he was swarmed by researchers eager to shake the honorary president's hand and express their admiration for his principles. He and Ava Helen received a stream of friends and well-wishers in their rooms at the Trianon.

  A week or so after the Congress, Pauling attended the International Phage Colloquium at the centuries-old Abbey of Royaumont outside Paris, where he heard the American microbiologist Alfred Hershey describe an ingenious experiment that had everyone talking. In an attempt to settle the question of whether DNA or protein was the genetic material, Hershey and a coworker, Martha Chase, had found a way to tag the DNA and protein of a bacterial virus with separate radioactive labels. By tracking the labels, they were able to show persuasively that the protein did nothing. DNA alone directed the replication of new viruses.